G'OP(tm)!

On the other hand, the F-35 is made in Vermont and is supposed to milk MIC cash until 2030's. It is swallowing the Air Force's budget whole right into Lockheed and Friends. I guess it is anti-war to dump the military budget into an aircraft that's useless and designed to eat money.

As for Hilliburton, she's on board with the New American Century, which is right on schedule.

I'm really bummed out that for most Americans, Bernie will always be "far left". I would like to live in a country where his views would be considered moderate, because to me, he's really just saying the truth.

I would be a lot more in favor of Bernie if I felt he actually understood the job he's interviewing for. The fact that Republicans control Congress means that no non-Republican president is going to have much of a chance to pass their agenda, but what is Bernie's answer to the problem? He expects to summon hordes of supporters to march on Washington any time he wants something passed, to intimidate the Republicans into doing what he wants. Because there are no alarming historical precedents for that sort of "solution", amirite? The only good thing about that plan -- Bernie's own plan, straight from his lips -- is that he's counting on the least reliable, worst demographic in the country to serve as his shock troops.

It still comes down to this: if we send assholes to Congress to represent us, we can expect assholish legislation. This is a point the Left is too fucking stupid to understand, which is why they keep hoping for a savior they can put in the Oval Office who will fix everything.

Bernie is never going to be allowed to get the nomination and the only reason the DNC has let him get this far and build this much popular support is because the second Hilary gets the nomination, they're going to pull a "LOOK OUT FOR THOSE REPUBLICANS!" card and try and steer Bernie's voters back into voting for another corporate center-right Democrat.

Them's the troofs.

It's the Jessie Jackson thing all over again.

Protest votes for me!

>>Bernie is never going to be allowed to get the nomination and the only reason the DNC has let him get this far and build this much popular support is because the second Hilary gets the nomination, they're going to pull a "LOOK OUT FOR THOSE REPUBLICANS!" card and try and steer Bernie's voters back into voting for another corporate center-right Democrat.

You make it sound like a conspiracy. OF COURSE that's what they're going to do!

>>because the second Hilary gets the nomination, they're going to pull a "LOOK OUT FOR THOSE REPUBLICANS!" card

the card has a point. What part of President Marco Rubio do you not understand.? The conventional wisdom is that Sanders is unelectable, and that's because Bernie Sanders is unelectable.

>>another corporate center-right Democrat.

But not JUST another corporate center-right Democrat! HAIL TO THE V, MOTHERFUCKERS!

People hate Hillary because she's seen as "a politician" Because being President really has nothing to do with politics?

The thing I'm really looking for in a Democratic candidate is the ability to deflect nasty republican attacks that WE KNOW will come, because every Democratic President becomes the worst person of all Republican attacks, and NOBODY in THE WORLD has more experience than Hilary Clinton. She's worked in TWO democratic whitehouses. This will be her fourth presidential campaign. And they're not going to dig up anything new on her. What are they going to, reopen Whitewater?

I'd love to see Bernie Sanders as President. And maybe a unicorn as attorney general.

I didn't mean to suggest it's a conspiracy. It's SOP.

Point is, however, the election cycle that we have in this country (because we don't have a democracy), absolutely prevents any real change from happening and disenfranchises people from actually participating in any real power at every step of the process.

I am fully aware of this. I just refuse to participate in the joke that is believing somebody like Hilary is, economically and on anything other than a purely surface level, going to be any different from someone like Rubio or Bush.

So when Sanders doesn't get the nomination, though I'll likely vote for him in the primary just to symbolize some popular desire for change (the merest we can muster without getting our heads bashed in), I'll just go ahead and switch my vote to voting for ideals like Jill Stein even though there's no way in hell the Green Party or her have a hope in hell of winning shit, not because of anyone not identifying with them, but because of how our election system is organized to keep anyone without a D or an R and the right approval out of the game.

After Colin Powell's UN snake oil pitch, I was more sure than ever that, if Saddam had any WMDs, Bush had no idea where they were.

I admit I was surprised at how exactly nothing Saddam had, though. I figured that they'd find some bunker somewhere with a few canisters of something or other, nothing even close to an arsenal, just some stray leavings that nobody'd bothered to clean up. But exactly nothing? I wasn't expecting that.

Remeber when they found that old ricin bomb, and they were claiming it was a WMD? The thiing actually went off accidentally, and two guys were exposed. They spent the afternoon in the infirmary. Some idiots on the internet were claiming that this was the WMDs they were looking for, so we should stop saying they didn't find anything, and I told them that a weapon of mass destruction, when detonated, will usually destroy something.

Bernie had the same intelligence to work with that Hillary did (as did Obama, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Americans who opposed the invasion) but he didn't drink that koolaid. The ability to see through bullshit is kind of an important skill for the president to have.

(That said, it's entirely possible that Hillary did see through it and voted for the war anyway because it was politically expedient to do so. Which is bad, but a different kind of bad.)

I'm probably going to end up voting for Hillary, but I'm not going to pretend that there's any excuse for this vote. That said, the 2008 campaign made it into such an issue that I doubt it will be much of an issue this time; everyone already knows how she voted on this.

"(That said, it's entirely possible that Hillary did see through it and voted for the war anyway because it was politically expedient to do so. Which is bad, but a different kind of bad.)"

It's very clear to me that this is what happened. Watch her in this video, she's talking about how she has to take the President at his word and she will trust that he will not launch a needless war. Washing her hands of the matter like Pontius Pilate, but still trying to urge Bush to not do what she knows he intends to.

I don't really like that she made that calculation, but I can understand it: if you're Dennis Kucinich, secure in Cleveland where you can do no wrong, you've got all the freedom to say the emperor is naked but checking how he looks in a flight suit; not everyone can get away with that. Had Hillary done the right thing, she might well have painted herself so un-American as to lose her seat, and the Republican who replaced her would be wrong on EVERY vote and not just some of them. In retrospect she would have done better to stand her ground, but at the time it was not so clear.

The answer, in my mind, is that we just need to keep voting Republicans out of office, and put fewer Democrats in this kind of bind.

Xen, my comments were in response to Sean Hannity defending George Bush.

Obviously, Bernie was right on this one. (incidentally, I didn't watch the video)

If Hillary could have prevented the Iraq war by fllushing her shot at the white house, and had failed to do so, that would have been morally reprehensible. As such, it's politics.

HOWEVER!

Let's remember what actually happened. She was beaten for the nomination by Obama, because Obama had opposed the invasion. Politically, this was ma gamble that didn’t pay off.

How are things going down there in Galt's Gultch? Will you be ready to lead us by 2024?

We're not at war with Russia, TPP is defunct, & HRC would have been impeached for her Pay for Play hijinks.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/clinton-f oundation-pay-to-play-debate/504803/

Yes asian hick. You're trying to be sarcastic again and doing it wrong, because you're not nearly as bright or informed as you think you are.

War chests can do a lot, but they can't actually buy votes, and are nowhere near as effective as a voter base that will overwhelmingly support you no matter what. That's what Kucinich had in Cleveland, for saving Muny Light back in the 1970s; all Kucinich had to do was hold up a light bulb and Cleveland would re-elect him to Congress no questions asked.

The only way Republicans were able to get rid of Kucinich was by redistricting: first they got rid of his district altogether so he would have to challenge some other incumbent for their district, then they carved up Cuyahoga County so that no chunk of it was big enough for Kucinich to win by appealing to his traditional base. (Cuyahoga County is now split between four districts, one of which trails across the Lake Erie shore all the way to Toledo.)

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, had no historical appeal to the people of New York.

Next time, asian hick, try expressing your argument without sarcasm and see if it doesn't immediately fall apart. Sarcasm won't fix a fundamentally stupid argument. THE MORE YOU KNOW

Where do I even start with this? I like the implication that I am uninformed because my response was terse and sarcastic. If I was, you should have been able to destroy it quickly as it "fell apart".

Instead you engaged one of the three points I made (not very effectively) and went on to crowing about Kucinich. Let's leave warchests aside for a moment and focus on the other two points I made: incumbency and partisanship of the state.

The average incumbency advantage for a US senator in recent decades is 9 percentage points (Ansolabehere and Snyder 2002). Given that she faced an extremely strong challenger in Lazio in 2000 and still received 55% of the vote, adding another 9 percentage points would make her all but invulnerable.

Finally, Clinton may not have had a personal connection to NY but she had a heavily Democratic state. It may surprise you to learn that the partisanship of a state as measured by its presidential vote is the second strongest predictor of senate vote (after incumbency) (ibid). Gore won New York by 25 points.

Clinton had arguably the safest seat in the Senate (she won in 2006 by 36 fucking points). It was well within her power to vote against Iraq but she did not.